Ok, I will grab that info and write over my page so it will be a sitewide 'article' (be searchable and visible until we add new articles. Also, do you think it is time to 'advertise' it on the front page and menu bars?

yeah, once the article is set... right now the Chat link in the Navigation panel points to this thread, and the first post has the link to the instruction/walkthrough pages. pointing links to the article sounds good (at least until the WagaWiki is all ready B) )

The trouble with Pandion is that for some reason the fonts it uses don't display in Gaim when using kana/kanji unless the Gaim user checks "Ignore font face" in the preferences, and right now the majority of users are using Gaim.

only the first 'body' is mandatory, the 'html' version is optional and up to the client whether to accept or not. if you don't have the fonts the user specified in the 'html' version installed, you probably won't see the text...

windows under english locales has horrible skill in selecting replacement fonts for font's that it doesn't have installed, often choosing 'Serif' or 'Default' which don't have the characters for Japanese... if you tweak the fonts.conf of GTK, this could probably be worked around by setting Japanese capable fonts as the default instead of generic windows default fonts... or by setting windows default font to something that has the right characters.

under Linux, the font subsystem keeps searching configured fonts until it finds the character or it runs out of fonts to search, then you get a box. it seems windows doesn't try hard enough.

well, I wanted to give some confort to people as ungainly with IT as I am;
I tried pandion, and got the "disconnected" error;
I tried psi, but for some reason it didn't work : i guess I made an error reading zengargoyle's instructions; so I tried Gaim, with the instructions by zengargoyle step by step (even if my version is not in english, it's clear enough) and it worked well, with windows; I had the problem "not reading" some people, and the "ignore font" recommended by rich (and unknown) worked well to solve it.

This is just to say that if I can do it (as, usually, when my computer doesn't do what I want, i pester the adminsitrator at work and give up or phone the hotline home), I guess everybody can do it.

And thanks to Rich who helped me here on line with patience, also with the IME problem.

hopefully this weekend or around the beginning of next week i'll have a better Online Chat Users page up. i have a test version running that shows the Chatrooms and the people inside the chatrooms so you can get a better idea of how many people are actually chatting versus just how many are connected to the server and maybe private chatting, or just hanging about...

i'm sure the forum will squash this, but the page will look something like this: